The Essence of Team

“The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.”

– Charles Du Bos (1882 – 1939), French essayist and critic

Team. Defined.

Teams sacrifice what they are for what they could become.

Drop the mic, um, er, I mean drop the keyboard. Whatever. The important thing is this — that’s what great teams do, for each other, with each other and sometimes in spite of each other. In short, they make each other better, and they relish in the growth, even when it’s forced on them.

It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get us here, now. And it will take something different to get us from here to there, wherever there may be.

One of the easiest traps for successful teams to fall into is complacency. “Well, this is who we are! Ain’t we something!?” “Heck, we’ve won our last 34 bids! We’ve got this licked!” “We’re Blockbuster! We’re the 800-pound gorilla. We “own” the market…”

The problem with complacency is the needle moves every day, and if we’re not the ones moving it, then someone else, a competitor, a client, a new-market-entitiy is moving the needle and they move ahead of us on the path that determines what we will become.

This approach requires the team to have crystal clarity on two topics: 1) what we are, and 2) what we could become — and we have to agree on those two things to engage together on the path that gets us “there.”

Editor’s Note: The planned 3-part series on “Team” will be a four-part series. If you missed Monday’s post, here it is. If you missed yesterday’s post, here it is, acknowledging that some e-mail delivery to subscribers was disrupted this week. No word yet as to whether the Russians are implicit in any disruption…